The books are where the Juice is.
I have written before about my process of creating realistic characters. It’s a bit of psychology, human behavioral study, plot-need fulfillment, and witch doctory. However, there is a greater aspect I’d like to discuss: that is, the broader social issues at hand.
When I write, I don’t like pounding people over the head with ideas, except in poetic works whose point is to punch folks in the face with an idea. For a short piece, like a poem, that’s fine. But you don’t want to be smacking someone in the head for 300 or 400 pages. They won’t read it, and if they do, you’ll wish you hadn’t read their review of your masterpiece. Therefore, I try to fold big ideas into my characters’ personality, but subtly. Some ideas, I inject simply by deciding who they are and what they look like.
For instance, all of my books feature ethnically diverse…
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